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By Jodi RudorenTHE NEW YORK TIMES • Monday January 27, 2014 7:35 AM

JERUSALEM — There is no plot to speak of, and the characters are woefully undeveloped. On the
upside, it can be a quick read — even at 1,250 pages.

The book consists of the single word
Jew, in tiny type, printed 6 million times to signify the number of Jews killed during the
Holocaust. It is meant as a kind of coffee-table monument of memory, a conversation-starter and
thought-provoker.

“When you look at this at a distance, you can’t tell whether it’s upside down or right side up,
you can’t tell what’s here; it looks like a pattern,” said Phil Chernofsky, the author, though that
term may be something of a stretch. “That’s how the Nazis viewed their victims: These are not
individuals, these are not people, these are just a mass we have to exterminate.

“Now get closer, put on your reading glasses and pick a ‘Jew,’” Chernofsky continued. “That Jew
could be you. Next to him is your brother. Oh, look, your uncles and aunts and cousins and your
whole extended family. A row, a line, those are your classmates.

“Now you get lost in a kind of meditative state where you look at one word,
Jew, you look at one Jew, you focus on it, and then your mind starts to go because who is
he, where did he live, what did he want to do when he grew up?”

The concept is not entirely original. The anonymity of victims and the scale of the destruction
is also expressed in the piles of shoes and eyeglasses on exhibit at former death camps in eastern
Europe.

Gefen Publishing, a Jerusalem company, imagines this book, titled
And Every Single One Was Someone, making a similar statement.

Ilan Greenfield, Gefen’s chief executive, said his goal is to print 6 million copies.